


hold my hand

by b00mgh



Category: 9-1-1: Lone Star (TV 2020)
Genre: Angst, Carlos Appreciation, Established Relationship, Fix-It of Sorts, How Do I Tag, Hurt/Comfort, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, M/M, bc he deserves it tbh, tarlos deserves happiness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-22
Updated: 2020-03-22
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:42:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23254894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/b00mgh/pseuds/b00mgh
Summary: AIGHT IM FUCKING TIRED BUT [my name redacted bc i am running from the government]'S FOOL BRAIN WILL NOT LEMME SLEEP UNTIL I WRITE THIS DOWN SO HERE IS GENERAL OUTLINE FOR AN ALT OF THAT ONE SCRNE whEre DUMBASS TK RIPS HIS FUCKING STITCHES FOR BUS DRIVER LADY WHO IS DROWNING W BROKEN FIRE HYDRANT AND HERE WE GOOr, that scene from the season finale with bus driver lady, but TK trips and almost dies because smoke inhalation is a bitch and pain is real!Also, Carlos helps bc it bugged me in the show that he just??? didn't try to help tk even though after a few minutes everyone outside was fine????? idk anyway here is fix-it-fic's scary cousin: i fixed it emotionally but it hurts worse now? Enjoy!
Relationships: Carlos Reyes/TK Strand
Comments: 26
Kudos: 155





	hold my hand

On the bright side, TK has put most of the fire out inside the bus. On the not-so-bright side, this is a class C extinguisher and that’s a gas fire, and the water level is rising faster than he thinks he can move this fucking bus seat, and the smoke is really making it hard to breathe (much less  _ see _ ), and he can barely hear Carlos over the cacophony outside, and he still doesn’t know what’s actually going on out there, and  _ god fucking dammit his chest hurts _ . Is this what it felt like to be shot the first time? It’s gotta feel something like this because  _ fuck ow ow owww _ . But he can’t just leave this lady here to drown, or burn, or asphyxiate in smoke or whatever else could happen. He can’t. Even if it hurts like getting shot again.

So TK takes a breath and throws everything he has into levering the bumper against the seat and he feels it move. Just a bit.

Ellen, the bus driver, feels a pressure lift off of her hips– and is absolutely over the moon about the bruising she can feel purpling her waist, because it means she can still feel  _ something _ down there.

“Can ya move?” TK slurs, much quieter than he’d been in the heat of the moment before.

With an emphatic nod, Ellen cries, “Yes! Oh my goodness, yes! Thank you so much–” and she trails off, because she can see TK’s shirt from her new angle as she wiggles herself out of confinement. That red spot is growing, and she has no idea what caused it. Did he hit himself? Did something poke him?  _ Why is he bleeding!? _

But Ellen is no doctor. She’s a bus driver. So she just asks, “Sir, are you okay?” as she sits up in the rising water.

TK nods, “‘m fine.” 

And then he falls over. 

Just. Sploosh. Like he’s decided to take a nap. And someone spilled a lot of red food coloring in the water. Ellen panics, but she can hardly see TK through all the smoke and she doesn’t have the strength to even drag him– she can barely stagger, as it is!– and she doesn’t know what else to do, so she goes for help. Crawling out of the emergency exit on the roof (now the side) of the bus, Ellen beelines for a man handling crowd and traffic control. By now everyone has stopped walking, stopped driving, stopped moving. They’re all just staring, recording, calling their loved ones, checking the news. The crowd-control man notices her limping towards him and meets her halfway.

“Ma’am, are you alright? Were you injured?”

“Yes– but don’t worry about that, worry about the young man over there– he collapsed and I can’t get him out!”

“Alright, please remain clam ma’am. My name is Carlos, I’m an off-duty police officer, and I’m going to help this man. Where did you last see him?”

“Right there! In the bus!”

Carlos’s face drops. The professionalism and color drain right out. He saw TK go into that bus. He’d yelled something about somebody being trapped. Carlos runs. 

“TK!?” he shouts, once he’s close.

Nothing but running water. The jumbled susurrus makes Carlos nervous. It’s loud.

He makes his way into the bus, even though smoke is leaping out of the windows and stretching into the sky, and there’s water up to his calves. It’s hard to see anything through the foggy fumes from the mostly-extinguished fire clinging to life near the front of the bus, and shapes are hard to make out in the watery mess of the ground. He’s wasting time. He needs to find TK faster than this– who knows what happened to him. Which would be worse: complications with the gunshot or something else? Why won’t TK respond?

“TK? Where are you?”

Still, nothing.

Carlos finds the front of the bus, and  _ thank god _ there’s TK, hardly conscious and almost underwater. If the smear of watery blood across the back of the messed up pleather seat is any indicator, TK dragged himself out of the water to his current position, but the water has already risen to meet his face once more. Every time TK blinks, his eyes roll back in his head.

“TK! TK, can you hear me?” Carlos’s throat is starting to hurt from the soot scraping it from the inside. 

The response isn’t verbal, but TK’s face moves like he says something, and his eyes find enough focus to squint in the dirty haze for a second. 

Carlos hauls TK up as gently as he can, given the circumstances, and shimmies out of the awkward emergency exit that’s dumping water onto the gritty pavement. And then he’s racked by a fit of coughing so violent that he decides to sit down on the wet, gritty pavement so that he doesn’t fall over, or drop TK. He couldn’t have been in the bus for more than a minute, but the smoke had felt suffocating. 

“TK, you there?” Carlos wheezes.

For two and a half seconds, nothing; then TK begins to cough and hack and he vomits up whatever tried to force its way into his throat and he heaves one, two, three, four breaths of clean air. 

“Carlos– that lady– bus driver–”

“She’s fine, she’s okay. TK, sit  _ down _ you’re hurting yourself!”

This information comes as a complete shock to TK, who squints. “I am?” He looks at his hands, his feet, tries to look at his nose, finally says, “It hurts,” and he pauses to cough before continuing, “but I can’t see where?”

Carlos finds a chuckle buried in his chest, and he unearths it around with the words “TK, has anyone ever told you that you’re a little bit clueless?”

“Yeah,” TK frowns, “I am.” It should be noted for the audience that TK has, at this point, lost all track of the conversation. He can barely string a coherent sentence together right now, trying to keep track of  _ other people’s  _ words is a lost cause. Lack of oxygen from near-drowning and smoke-inhalation, combined with mind-numbing pain from ripped stitches losing your blood in muddy bus-water, makes a brain foggy. All of this information can be used for context for TK’s next words: “Carlos, why are we sitting on the ground?”

“Because I can’t carry you with ash in my lungs, but we’re good now.” And Carlos pulls himself and TK to their respective feet, and when it’s clear TK’s won’t cooperate, he swings TK’s uninjured arm over his shoulders to make sure his boyfriend isn’t about to fall over again. “Your dad’s gonna kill me,” he mutters. 

“Nah,” TK giggles, “he knows you’re the only thing standing between the Austin Emergency Services Department and chaos– he won’t kill you, babe.”

“I thought that was Marjan,” Carlos replies as they meander to the sidewalk and find a seat next to a man with an impressive beard on a call to his kids. “She seems like a force of nature anyway.” Carlos doesn’t know her too well, just knows that when she talks, people listen– then again, everyone is pretty good at listening to everyone else in the 126, so who knows.

TK, apparently, knows. “Yeah, but she’s as likely to be part of the chaos as against it. Paul  _ could _ keep us in line if he had the motivation, but a lot of times he just lets stuff happen. My dad thinks keeping people in line is like trying to herd cats.”

“So now the fillibuster topic is how good I am at controlling people?” Carlos smirks.

“ _ Helping _ people. And I don’t think I’m filibustering anything but a call to Michelle. I hurt a  _ lot _ .”

“Your friend Ellen already called 911–”

“Haha, that’s usually us!”

“– but TK I just need to know where you stand with this before I take things too far and we have a repeat of that awkward midnight dinner date.”

TK lets a heavy breath leave his chest with a wince. “Carlos. I like you. A lot. Maybe I love you– I don’t wanna make that jump with my brain full of smoke– but I want to be with you. I can reassure you of that as many times as you need. But preferably when I’m in my right mind after a glass of water.”

“Oh.”

After a few seconds of quiet in which Carlos digested TK’s words and TK tried to shake the foggy feeling out of his head with very little success, TK says, “Can I hold your hand? I want a hug, but I think that would hurt more than anything.”

And they sit on the sidewalk and hold hands until the crew of the 126 shows up and freaks out because TK has  _ clearly _ ripped his stitches and they usher TK and Ellen into the back of an ambulance, and they give Carlos a ride to the hospital and then they hold hands in a hospital room. 

**Author's Note:**

> alright my outline for this (written in delirium at two am lmao) was pretty funny imo so here it is even though nobody asked:
> 
> "LADY STUCK TO TRY TO HELP AND HE KINDA MOVES SOMN BUT THEN HE FUCKING PASSES OUT BC SMOKE AND OUCHIES THATS A F U C K I N G GUNSHOT WOUND AND BUS DRIVER LADY IS LIKE SHIT FUCK SHIT GODDAMIT WTF AND SHE WIGGLES OUT BUT SHE CANT EVEN REALLY MOVE VERY WELL SO SHE KINDA JUST GETS HERSELF OUTTA HARMS WAY AND THEN FINDS CARLOS DIRECTING TRAFFIC OR WHATEVER THE FUCK AND SHES LIKE HEY THERES A DUDE HERE AND CARLOS GOES WTF IS HE LIKE THIS TALL CLEARLY GAY AND WE JUST HAD THE TALK AND SHES LIKE UUUUHHHHH YEA? Maybe?? AND CARLOS GOES OH NOE THATS MY BF WHO AINT MY BF BUT HE MY BF AND MAYBE I JUST TAKE THE WHOLE SCENE ABT THEM NOT BEING BFS BC I DONT LIKE THAT KINDA DRAMA EW BUT ANYWAY CARLOS SAYS OH NOEEE MY BOI ANS HE FINDS DUMBASS TK FACE DOWN IN THE FUCKING WATER BOUTTA DROWN IN HALF A FOOT OF FUCKING WATER AND HES LIKE AAAAHHHH THERE IS BLOOD WHY IS THERE BLOOD AND HE HELPS HIM AND LETS PRETEND DAD MAN DONT GET THERE FOR A WHILE BC I. WANT. ANGST. YEEEEEET NOW LET ME SLEEP GOBLIN BRAIN GOOODDDDDDD DAMMIT"
> 
> anyway, i hope u enjyed the Bois
> 
> Scream at me in the comments, nothing brings me more joy!


End file.
